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Little Backblaze Continues Disruption of Cloud Storage Sector

Backblaze is the storage mouse that roars. It competes directly against Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Storage.

Developers, with all their code libraries, components and go-to code snippets they keep at hand to use whenever they need them, are always looking for good, cheap—but reliable—cloud storage.

This is exactly where Backblaze comes to the rescue, and in a big way. The company on Sept. 22 launched a new raw cloud storage service, Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, to serve that sector—in addition to anybody else who needs massive storage capacity for next to nothing in cost. And that could be a lot of companies.

Backblaze is the storage mouse that roars. It competes directly against Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Storage.

Backblaze claims—and it can back it up—to have built the world's lowest-cost cloud storage. AWS, Google and Microsoft can argue this point, but they will lose the debate. None of those well-known storage names can claim to charge unlimited data backup in the cloud for laptops and desktops for $5 per month, nor can they offer enterprise data storage for less than Backblaze charges.

Further reading

"We're going to charge one-half cent/GB/month," Backblaze founder and CEO Gleb Budman told eWEEK. "The lowest cost [AWS] S3 tier is 2.2 cents/GB/month, and even [AWS] Glacier, which has a 4-hour data transfer delay and other charges, is 1 cent/GB/month."

Now the San Mateo, Calif.-based company is opening its cloud storage directly to users through the Web, command line and an API—take your pick.

Backblaze is already well-known in developer circles for its Storage Pods—cloud storage hardware that costs about one-tenth that of other offerings.

"Most people don't realize that consumer-type hard drives and other components generally work just as well and crash just as often as commercial drives, only they cost a great deal less," Budman said. "We use the least-expensive hardware possible, and because the software is so good, it's as reliable and available as much more expensive services. We just make everything very redundant."

B2 can be used for any application, and developers can do anything they want with it: build the next hot mobile app on the platform, stash historical development files or use it for personal backup.

If you're worried that Backblaze perhaps can't be trusted because you're never heard of it, well, it's been in business for 10 years and has a long list of clients. eWEEK first reported on Backblaze in 2009. Budman said that Backblaze's backup service already is housing more than 150 petabytes of data (150,000 TB) and adds 5 petabytes of storage every month for its existing service.

When it launches next month, B2 will provide three access choices: a RESTful API, command-line interface (CLI) and Web utility for uploading files. "We will only charge for what you use, not for X amount of capacity," Budman said.

All users will receive versioned files, snapshots, reporting and alerts as well as mobile access—no matter how much they spend.

B2 will launch a private beta in October, so developers can start using before it becomes widely available later this year. Go here for more information.